Extreme 'Rogue Wave' in the North Pacific Confirmed as Most Extreme on Record

Re:Extreme 'Rogue Wave' in the North Pacific Confirmed as Mo... by rcxdude on Thursday January 12, 2023 @01:49PM (#34358490)

only kind of, the suprising thing is they are way bigger than expected (or rather, rogue waves of a given height are orders of magnitude more likely than you would expect from just adding together the statistics of each frequency of wave). There's some other interaction or non-linear behaviour going on which causes them to occur with the frequency that they do, and I don't think there's a single model which actually explains them.

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Re:Extreme 'Rogue Wave' in the North Pacific Confirmed as Mo... by saboot on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:36PM (#34359146)

Wave dynamics, specifically ones which have interactions with the ground, are some of the few systems that need derivatives higher than two to describe them. Lots of interesting stuff going on

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Re:Extreme 'Rogue Wave' in the North Pacific Confirmed as Mo... by danenania on Thursday January 12, 2023 @03:22PM (#34359763)

Thanks for explaining this. I was also familiar with the ‘doubling up’ effect and figured rogue waves were just the unlikely result of multiple double-ups that happen to line up just so. As a surfer you get used to seeing ‘bombs’ once a session or so that are 50-100% bigger than typical set waves (which are already bigger than the average waves). It wouldn’t seem much of a stretch from there to expect that two of those bombs could find each other and double up now and then, and from there that two of those super-bombs would double up every once in awhile.

It’s interesting to know that they happen a lot more often than would be expected statistically from those simple mechanics. Yet another fun potential rare event to keep in mind while surfing in Northern California :)

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